TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Uncharted waters: When hydrogen fails, the students turn to that old standby--gasoline Editor's Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students are traveling up New York's Hudson River this week on the New Clermont , a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motor. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan's Pier 84 and will cover 240 kilometers (at a projected speed of 8 kilometers per hour). After making several stops along the way, the crew expects to arrive back at Rensselaer Polytech's campus in Troy, N.Y., on September 25. This is the second of Scientific American.com's blogs chronicling this expedition, called the New Clermont Project. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Wind Farmers Go To School On Fish The use of wind power continues to soar around the world. In 2008 the U.S. actually surpassed Germany as the world’s top producer of energy from wind. It might seem that there aren’t many improvements to make to what’s essentially a passive technology. But researchers at the California Institute of Technology say the way fish school will help create more efficient designs for wind farms. They presented their research at a meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics.When fish swim, they leave little swirling vortices in their wake. By swimming together in a school, they can transfer energy to one another through these vortices. Wind behaves much as a liquid does. So the engineers have taken wind turbines that spin on vertical axes--these are different from the traditional horizontal wind turbine mostly in use today. On a computer, they’ve positioned the turbines close enough together that as one spins, it then directs the wind to its neighbor. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Bad news for bats: Deadly white-nose syndrome still spreading The bat-killing fungal infection known as white-nose syndrome (WNS) has spread into Tennessee for the first time. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) has confirmed that infected bats were found in Worley's cave in Sullivan County, where they had been hibernating. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Padlocking the Gates to the Great Outdoors Seeking to streamline their budgets, states have made their parks easy targets. nytimes.com |
Readers Respond to "Is Time an Illusion?" and Other Articles Milky Way Time In “ Is Time an Illusion? ” Craig Callender discusses the difficulty of telling if two events are simultaneous or not and thus of establishing a universal, standard measure of time. This argument always seems unconvincing to me. We know how fast our galaxy is rotating, we know our sun’s position and velocity, and we know Earth’s position and velocity. It seems to me that we could easily define a “Milky Way Standard Time” much as was done when we agreed on Greenwich Mean Time way back in the late 1800s, which made it easy to decide what time it was in California when something happened at a certain time in Chicago. By the same token, but with more to calculate than just a difference in longitude, it should be possible to compute the Milky Way Standard Time when two events occurred and determine if they were really simultaneous or not. Does this make the problem go away? [More] rss.sciam.com |